Saturday

Nov.
27, 2004

St. Clement's Day Song

Clementsing, clementsing,
apples and pears,
One for Peter, two for Paul, three for Him that made us all!
Up with your stockings and down with your shoes,
If you haven't got apples, money will do.
Put your hand in your pocket and fetch out your keys,
Go down in the cellar and fetch out what you please,
An apple, a pear, a plum or a cherry,
A bottle of wine to make us all merry.
The roads are so dirty, our boots are so thin,
Our pockets are empty and got nothing in.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of journalist Gail
Sheehy, born in Mamaroneck, New York (1937). Just before her 40th
birthday, she published her fifth and most famous book, Passages: Predictable
Crises of Adult Life. The book was a number-one bestseller in 1977, and
in 1991, it came in ninth in a Library of Congress survey of the most influential
books in people's lives.

Gail Sheehy said, "It is a paradox that as we reach our prime, we also see there is a place where it finishes."

It's the birthday of theater producer David
Merrick, born David Margulies in St. Louis, Missouri (1911).
David Merrick said, "I'll tell you what's like to be Number One. I compare it to climbing
Mt. Everest. It's very difficult. Lives are lost along the way. You struggle
and struggle and finally you get up there. And guess what there is once you
get up there? Snow and ice."

It's the birthday of writer James
Agee, born in Knoxville, Tennessee (1909). He was 16 when his father
was killed in a car accident, and as an adult he worked for nearly two decades,
on and off, on a manuscript that tried to recreate, as he put it, "my childhood
and my father, exactly as I can remember and represent them." He never finished
it; but after he died it was published as the novel A Death in the Family,
and won the Pulitzer Prize (1957). He's also the author of the book Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), generally considered to be a masterpiece.
He was an obsessive person, an insatiable talker, addicted to cigarettes,
alcohol, and Benzedrine. He died of a heart attack in a New York cab in 1955,
with no will, no insurance, and $450 in the bank.

It's the birthday of writer and actress Fanny
Kemble, born in London (1809). She was one of the most famous actresses
of the American stage: Whitman mentions her in Leaves of Grass. She
owned property that later became the site of Tanglewood in the Berkshires
of Massachusetts. There, according to one historian, "She fished, she wore
loose trousers, she rode alone, didn't water her punch and so got all the
'best' inhabitants quite drunk at tea one day, as she read unexpurgated versions
of Shakespeare."

It's the birthday of statesman and amateur scientist Robert
Livingston, born in New York City (1746). He became one of the twelve
New York delegates to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and
served on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson
appointed him ambassador to France, where with the help of James Monroe, he
negotiated the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. He also experimented with steam
power, and entered into a partnership with Robert Fulton: the first successful
steamboat voyage, up the Hudson from New York to Albany, was made in 1807
by Fulton's boat, the Clermont.

It's the birthday of astronomer Anders
Celsius, born in Uppsala, Sweden (1701). He took part in two expeditions
that verified Newton's theory that the earth is slightly flattened at its
poles. He oversaw the construction of the first modern observatory in Sweden,
but despite his contributions to astronomy, he is best known today as the
inventor of the Celsius, or centigrade, thermometer.

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